The Skulls Are Cold, the House Is Hot: Interpreting Depths of Meaning in Iban Therapy

The effectiveness of words: Religion and healing among the Lubavitch of Stamford Hill

“…(The interpretive genre paradoxically enhances dualism through displacing the truth claims of medicine onto that discipline itself.) We do not argue here for a particular sense of 'meaning' or 'symbol', let alone a psychological or linguistic explanation of human signification and representation, except to say that we favour the observations of many of the authors in Foster and Brandes (1980) that one can locate the same 'symbolisations' on a spectrum between the expressly referential and the figurative, the shallow and the deep (Barrett and Lucas 1993), and that movement between the two modes seems mediated by intention, context or affect. As we argue below, movement in the referential direction may be such that lexical representations become objectified as entities in themselves, less meanings to be unravelled than themselves directly gaining ontological status in the cognised world (McGuire 1983, Wagner 1986, Lakoff 1987, Tambiah 1990 cf.…”

“…Kabbalistic texts embody a variety of complex, sometimes playful, shifts and crosscuttings between 'depths' of interpreting the Torah, from the referential to the figurative: literal reference (peshat), conscious allegory (remez), Talmudic commentary (derasha) and mystical (sod) (cf. Feinberg 1990, Barrett andLucas 1993). These four levels are known by the acronym pardes (orchard).…”

“…Lawson andMcCauley 1993). As such they may be quite diverse (Sperber 1985), circumscribed (Caws 1974), of variable 'depth' (Feinberg 1990, Barrett andLucas 1993), unrelated to actual experience (Jackson 1983), ambiguous (Bourdieu 1977, Hobart 1982 or of little general concern (Sperber 1975, Schieffelin 1985. Healing idioms may be considerably less systematised than anthropologists recognise (Young 1976, Laderman 1987, Kirmayer 1993 and indeed may gain their very efficacy through some meta-communicative unintelligibility (Last 1981, McGuire 1983, Csordas 1988) -Malinowski's "coefficient of weirdness.…”

Interpreting culture and psychopathology: Primitivist themes in cross-cultural debate

“…Putting to rest the question of whether or not the shaman is psychotic (Barrett 1993: 239), we sought to ground our analysis in Iban epistemology by attending to an ethnographically distinctive notion of language depth, which turns on a contrast between 'shallow meanings' that are easy to understand, and 'deep meanings' which perplex. Deep language engages the patient, the family, the shaman healer and a wider audience in an active effort to interpret the significance of illness, and to negotiate its treatment (Barrett and Lucas 1993). Our analysis is attuned to the limits of understanding which shamans themselves recognize, and to the ambiguities of meaning which Iban commentators pursue and elaborate with such enthusiasm.…”

Forests and human health: assessing the evidence

“…They emphasize the importance of looking at context, from a particularistic point of view, 51 in trying to understand people's health status and experience. Barrett and Lucas (1993) provide a quintessentially anthropological analysis of 'depth' and 'shallowness' of meaning and 'heat' and 'cold' among the Iban of Sarawak in Malaysia. They trace these ideas through various components of the Iban way of life, including birth, death, illness, and the actions of shamans.…”